A half-century after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, everything that could
possibly have been said about that horrifying November day in Dallas has seemingly been
covered.

Scores of books and films have offered explanations, from the plausible to the bizarre, of how
an inconsequential person such as Lee Harvey Oswald could have killed the most powerful man in the
world.

Yet three authors — Larry J. Sabato, a political-science professor at the University of
Virginia; Thurston Clarke, a historian; and Philip Shenon, a former
New York Times reporter — demonstrate in a trio of new offerings that gifted writers can
keep to filling in remaining gaps.

With each focusing on a distinct aspect, the books together provide fresh insight into a
presidency and an assassination that continue to mesmerize even people who weren’t alive in
1963.

In
The Kennedy Half Century:The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy, Sabato shows how
Kennedy was transformed from a charismatic, if flawed, man into a mythological figure on the scale
of Abraham Lincoln.

Sabato goes far beyond Kennedy’s presidency to explore how his legacy has affected every
president since, particularly Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan.

Most important, Sabato relies on “cutting-edge audio technology” to debunk a key finding of a
House committee in 1979 that an open microphone on a Dallas police officer’s motorcycle picked up
the sound of a fourth shot — suggesting the involvement of a second shooter.

Far more disturbing — because it is so convincing — is Shenon’s
A Cruel and Shocking Act: The SecretHistory of the Kennedy Assassination.

The gifted reporter relies on hundreds of interviews and thousands of pages of documents to show
that the CIA and State Department officials suspected that Oswald, two months before the
assassination, had had contacts with Cuban and Soviet officials on a trip to Mexico City.

Shenon takes us inside the Warren Commission and follows Oswald’s conversion to Marxism, his
decision to move to the Soviet Union, his return to the United States and the trip to Mexico
City.

He resists the urge to draw sweeping conclusions he cannot support, but the evidence he
assembles is frightening.

At a time when John Kennedy and his brother Robert were orchestrating an attempt to assassinate
Cuban leader Fidel Castro, Oswald was meeting with people linked to Cuban intelligence.

Such a context suggests the possibility that Oswald either was acting on Cuban orders or, more
likely, wanted to prove he was worthy of the Cuban communists by killing the president.

In the third offering,
JFK’s Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great
President, Clarke acknowledges that the president had deep flaws, particularly his repeated
extramarital affairs.

But he contends that the 1963 death of newborn son Patrick helped inspire

Kennedy to become a better husband and a more forceful leader — one determined to make his mark
as president.

Clarke isn’t entirely convincing, but he offers evidence that Kennedy was undergoing a
transformation in the fall of 1963 before Oswald opened fire.

The book represents a major contribution to what we already know about the 35th president.